I hate LinkedIn but need it for a few things, mostly accessing certain clients and projects as a freelancer. Last October my ISP (Vodafone UK) assigned me a datacenter-classified IPv6 address with 80+ abuse reports on reputation databases, for bots, DDoS, crawlers. Before I realized this I started getting locked out, suspended, restricted from just about every web service I use, having to solve captchas for simple Google searches, etc.

I resolved everything except LinkedIn. They required Persona verification to restore access, but I'd already recently verified with Persona, so clicking the re-verification links just returned a Catch-22 "you've already verified with us." LinkedIn support is unreachable unless you're signed into an account. I tried direct emails, webforms, DMs to LinkedIn Help on Twitter, all completely ignored.

Eventually some cooldown timer must have expired, because Persona finally let me re-verify last week. Upon regaining access, I was encouraged me to verify with Persona AGAIN, this time for the verified badge.

I now have a taste of what "digital underclass" means, and look forward to the day when no part of my income depends on horrible platforms that make me desperate for the opportunity to give away my personal data!

I also feel that digital companies get away with “no human representatives”. I should always have access to a human. It should be law. It will screw over a lot of companies and I am all for it since they don’t know what service looks like if it looked them in the eyes.

LinkedIn (like Teams) is a Microsoft product. And it shows.

However, they have a very generous free trial for sales/recruitment. You could probably activate it and get real support.

> look forward to the day when no part of my income depends on horrible platforms that make me desperate for the opportunity to give away my personal data

We are moving into the opposite direction. Drink a verification can.